Corporate surveillance (spying) has become a larger problem as the Internet is used more and more for day to day company activities. Secure communication protocols, such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), have solved problems associated with hiding the content of data being transmitted and communicated on the World-Wide Web (WWW), but these protocols do nothing to hide the site names (Uniform Resource Locator (URL) links) and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are visited.
So, even if SSL is being used in a communication over the Internet, any machine that can see the packets in route can find the requested and requesting Internet Protocol (IP) address involved in the Internet communication. IP address information can then be assembled to build a profile of the requesting site. The assembled profiles can then be used by corporate spies to gain unfair competitive advantages.
For example, consider an investment firm that spies on its competitors in the manner discussed above where IP addresses are inspected to build profiles. The spying investment firm can find out the sites that another investment firm is researching; this knowledge can be used to help the spying firm and hurt the firm associated with the site being monitored.
A typical solution to this problem is for enterprise's to use an anonymizer. An anonymizer can hide the URL's of the site being browsed. One issue with this is that the URL can also be hidden from the user's own corporation as well. Yet, many corporations need/desire to monitor or restrict that sites that employees visit. In order to correct such a situation, and in many cases for liability reasons, enterprises use internal firewalls to block known anonymizers. So, current anonymizers are generally not used by enterprises to solve corporate profiling and spying issues because the enterprises cannot monitor the sites visited by their own employees when anonymizers are permitted.
Another problem with existing anonymizers is that they are configured by the users that request them. So, the end user must manually go to the anonymizer site and use the anonymizer's interface to browse the Internet and WWW. Again, this scenario removes all control by the user's enterprise and places the burden of control on each individual user. Moreover, the end user may not understand the WWW environment and may not make good choices on how the anonymizer is to be used.
Thus, it is desirable to have improved techniques for anonymous Internet access from the perspective of an enterprise.